A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

There is currently a great deal of alarm being expressed in
the public sphere over the evidence [which I consider reliable] that the
Russian government has attempted, and continues to attempt, to influence
American elections surreptitiously.Some
people on the left respond to these expressions of alarm by calling attention
to the many successful efforts by the American government to influence the
outcome of elections abroad or indeed simply to bypass the electoral process
and overthrow foreign governments, charges that I consider to be well-established.

I am never entirely clear what conclusion I am supposed to
draw from this left response. That
America is reprehensible?To be
sure.That the mainstream expressions of
alarm are hypocritical?No doubt.But there is sometimes an additional implied
assertion, namely that we on the left ought not therefore to share the alarm
being expressed, and this I believe is wrongheaded.Let me explain why.

I want to see the United States changed in very deep,
fundamental, and far-reaching ways.I
can summarize these changes briefly with the slogan, suitable for a bumper
sticker, “Make America Socialist.”I am
too old and too wise to imagine that anything remotely like this will happen
soon, if indeed ever, but that is what I want, and I am pleased, indeed thrilled,
by any steps taken in that direction.

Leaving aside divine intervention or the arrival of benevolent
space aliens, I can see only two ways in which the changes I want can come
about:through the electoral process, or
violently and extra-legally.It is my
considered opinion that violent social revolution in the United States is right
up there in likelihood with the Second Coming.Which leaves the electoral process.That is why I welcomed the emergence on the national scene of Bernie
Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist even though his policy
proposals are really FDR New Deal Liberalism.That is why I was delighted by the appearance and electoral success of Democratic
Socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.And
that is why I am tickled to read that among young people, “socialism” ranks
high as one of their preferred economic and political systems, despite the fact
that almost none of those responding to the poll have any coherent notion of
what socialism is.

I want candidates like Ocasio-Cortez to run for election and
win.There are only two ways that can
happen.Either people supporting such
candidates come to the polls, vote for them, and have their votes recorded and counted, or some foreign or
domestic hackers meddle with the voting process to the benefit of socialist
candidates.I can see very little
evidence that those currently screwing with the electoral process
electronically are inclined to do so to the benefit of left candidates.

Which explains why I am alarmed when Russians meddle with our
elections.

But, some will respond, desperate not to be seen agreeing
with those they hate, what about gerrymandering and voter suppression?Why aren’t you alarmed about that?But that is a silly question.Of course I am alarmed about gerrymandering and
voter suppression.I have been for
generations.Indeed, if we recall that
the most successful voter suppression effort in American history was Jim Crow,
I can say that I have been alarmed about voter suppression my entire very long
life.Now doing something about
gerrymandering and voter suppression requires, among other things, gaining control
of state legislatures.And how do we do
that?Either by spending millions of
dollars essentially bribing state legislators or by electing progressive state
legislators.We on the left are not
entirely without financial resources, but the noblest among us [perhaps
foolishly] look askance at bribery.

Which leaves us, once again, with elections.

Look, the big structural problem with capitalism is that it
puts most of the power in the hands of capital.That is a feature, not a bug, from the standpoint of defenders of the
existing order.All we on the left have
to fight with is the truth [good luck with that] and numbers, great big
overwhelming numbers.

Which is why I am alarmed by efforts, foreign or domestic,
to screw with the electoral process.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Once more I am reminded of the chasm between high theory and
the quotidian details of political action.It all feels like one of
Shakespeare’s history plays or comedies, in which the scenes of drama or love
at the very highest level of art and seriousness alternate with scenes of low
farce.

After meditating on the terrifying possibility of a nuclear
attack on North Korea or Iran triggered by the narcissism and infantile rages
of Donald Trump, I turn my attention to trying to get the Ryan Watts Congressional
campaign to keep track of the responses to my fund-raising mailing so that when
I send a second appeal after Labor Day I can build into the letters a thank you
for prior donations.Not exactly rocket
science, but it just might induce a few to give again, and at an even higher
level.Of such considerations is an on-the-ground
political campaign constructed.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Some of you have expressed concern that Trump, in a pique or
to distract attention from his worsening legal peril, will launch an attack on
Iran.This is a prospect that keeps me
up at night, and I am not soothed by the thought that John Bolton is whispering
in his ear.I suppose we must hope that
he is so in thrall to Putin that he will not dare without getting Russian
clearance, which I should like to think he would not get.In the face of such dangers, it seems
feckless to soldier on trying to elect a Democrat in the NC 6th CD,
but I think we must teach ourselves to operate on several planes
simultaneously. Launching a cruise missile
strike on forewarned Syrian airbases, all the while eating a large piece of
chocolate cake, is his infantile notion of exercising his war powers.Unfortunately, a one-off air attack on Iran
would have catastrophic consequences.

Short of pulling up stakes and fleeing the country, I do not
see what else I can do save add my tiny bit to the political struggle.

Friday, July 27, 2018

I think Trump is on the ropes, and now is the time for us to pile on. I will keep working for young Ryan Watts here in the NC 6th CD, a long shot to be sure. If you are lucky enough to live in the district of one of the new progressive Democrats or Democratic Socialists popping up, get out there and work your tail off. If you live in a safe district, as I did until last year, try to donate something to any one of many good candidates. In Midterms, enthusiasm is what matters most, since turnout is so low. The Trump administration is doing constant and immeasurable harm to any victim it can find, from immigrant families to bald eagles. It will take a long time simply to repair the damage, let alone move forward.But look on the bright side. Some vandal unmoored one of the DeVos family's ten yachts, and it suffered some damage before they could corral it. As I was walking this morning at 4:50 a.m. under a glorious full moon, a vagrant thought crossed my mind: Why couldn't the sixties have happened in my eighties rather than my thirties?

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

The Trump government has released a transcript and video of the joint press conference Trump and Putin held immediately after their Helsinki meeting. As you will no doubt recall, it was televised live. During that press conference, an American reporter asked Putin whether he had wanted Trump to be elected President, and Putin said [or the interpreter represented him as saying] "yes."In the transcript just released by the White House, this exchange is missing. On the video, it has been excised.I do not think we need speculate anymore about whether Trump desires to be an authoritarian dictator on the Orwellian model. The only question remaining is whether he will succeed.

A great deal has been said about the fact that Trump had no aides with him during his two hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki. Even more is being said about the fact that more than a week later, his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Director of National Intelligence seem not to have been briefed on the content of that meeting, including any agreements that Trump and Putin reached. I have the very strong suspicion that this absence of briefing is a consequence of the fact that Trump cannot remember what he said or agreed to. This is, of course, appalling, but it has an up side. If Trump cannot recall what he said, then he cannot implement the agreements. I do not think George Orwell foresaw the possibility of an incompetent authoritarian dictator.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Spending several days cleaning up a database, merge printing
letters of appeal for the campaign of young Ryan Watts, and then wrestling my
cranky HP inkjet printer so as to merge print a corresponding set of envelopes
[the printer every so often seizes up on the envelopes] had a quite unexpected
side effect.It gave me a sense of
peace, however brief.For a few days, I
felt that I was actually doing something about the political disaster unfolding
in plain view.Now, I am painfully aware
that what I was doing did not even rise to the level of a drop in the ocean,
but I was doing it, not just talking
about it.At this point, I do not even
know whether the effort will raise any money. The next two weeks should tell.

As I have observed somewhere before on this blog, so long as
you are just thinking about things,
you might as well think about everything,
since it is no harder than just thinking about something.I mean, why think
about trolley cars when you can think about the world historical mission of
Capitalism?But if you want to actually change the world,
it takes an enormous effort to make a small change, and ten times as much
effort to make a somewhat bigger change.

Taking back the House is really a rather small step, and it
would be fatally easy to sit back and observe that taking the House will have
very little effect on American imperialism or the crushing consequences of
capitalism for the world’s poor.But
taking back the House is at least something.Now that something, small as it is, requires flipping
twenty-three House seats, and flipping just one of them requires an entire four
month political campaign, and an entire four month political campaign requires
raising serious money, and raising serious money requires sending letters to
thousands and thousands of people, and preparing just five hundred of those
letters requires that someone do what I did these past few days.

Academic intellectuals are not accustomed to toiling in the
vineyards.They are not even accustomed
to running a vineyard.They are usually
not satisfied with anything less than considering the theoretical preconditions
of vineyards in general.That is why
good old Karl Marx observed that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Well, I have cranked out another 185 fundraising letters to
folks here at Carolina Meadows [this time to those registered as Unaffiliated],
so I think I will take a break before merge-printing the matching envelopes and
say something about the controversy I stirred up by describing the anti-Trump
TV commentators as “privileged” and “self-congratulatory.”I was being flip, but the underlying issue is
actually quite interesting and deserving of some extended commentary.

I shall begin by reminding you all yet again of a few
statistical facts that I allude to quite frequently.First, only one-third of adult Americans have
college degrees.Two-thirds do not.Second, median household income in 2016 [the
latest figure I could find] was $59,039.In other words, one-half of all American households had annual income
that year of less than that amount, the other half had more.For example, if a husband and wife both work
full-time jobs for the year, taking two weeks of unpaid vacation each year, the
husband earning $20 an hour driving a panel truck delivering furniture around
town and the wife earning $10 an hour cleaning houses, the two of them are
rather better off than half of all American households.Keep those statistics in mind.

Cable news, which I watch more or less obsessively,
typically features a host [Wolf Blitzer, Ali Velshi, Nicole Wallace, Anderson
Cooper, all those Fox News types, and so forth], a rotating panel of regular
commentators, and special guests brought on for their expertise in the story of
the moment.There are also reporters in
the field – people talking into handheld microphones checking in from a
political rally, a hurricane, a bus crash, a demonstration, or some other
newsworthy event – and these reporters will quite often interview someone on
site, a police chief, a student in a high school where there has been a mass
shooting, a person attending a political rally.

I am quite sure, without having taken the trouble to check,
that virtually every single cable news host, commentator, panel member, special
guest, and field reporter is a college graduate, and most of them are graduates
of one of the top 200 or so colleges and universities among the more than 2,600
Bachelor’s Degree granting institutions of higher education in America or their
foreign equivalents.The only members of
the non-college two-thirds who ever appear on TV are people being interviewed
in the field.The majority without
college degrees have educational credentials inferior to the minority who are
graduates, and they know it.What is more, they may be uncredentialed, but
they are not stupid.Ask yourself how
they feel about the fact that one of them is on TV always as the object of the news report, never as the subject, always being asked “what it
felt like,” never “what it means.”If
you are heavily into Lit Crit and Identity Theory, you might even want to
employ the currently fashionable term “being othered.”

Let me give you as an example of what I am talking about
something I saw on old-time TV maybe fifty years ago or so.I was watching a right-wing talk show called The Firing Line, the brainchild of that rather
odd, exquisitely cultivated and educated icon of American conservatism, William
F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley had invited onto
his show a White couple from the rural south who had protested [as I recall]
the fact that their child was being told things in school about evolution that
conflicted with their Fundamentalist Protestant beliefs.Also on the show were a pair of big city
lawyers defending the School Board.Buckley was a devout Roman Catholic, not a Protestant, but he was on the
side of the parents in this dispute.The
couple were clearly of very modest means, dressed in their Sunday Go To Meeting
best for the TV appearance and visibly ill at ease.The opposing lawyers were impeccably dressed
and quite casually fluent.Now Buckley
was with the parents in this fight, but he treated them more or less as
specimens, not as people.By his every
facial grimace and ironic vocal tone when talking to the lawyers, he managed to
communicate, as clearly as if he had said it, “You and I, we are alike, for all
that we are on opposite sides in this dispute.I can easily imagine you coming to my elegant apartment for one my
famous harpsichord performances.These
benighted folks, whose cause I thoroughly embrace, are however infra dignitatem.”

The regulars on cable news travel in the same social
circles, regardless of their political affiliations.They know one another personally, often run
into one another at social events, and exhibit toward one another, even in the
midst of vigorous, even heated, political disagreements on television, a
variety of verbal cues and body language that communicate to anyone capable of
noticing [which is to say, everyone] that they are all members of the same
social circle.Let me cite one example,
to me at least quite striking.Michael
Cohen, universally described now as “Trump’s fixer,” has been much in the news
lately.Donnie Deutsch frequently
appears as a panelist on Morning Joe
on MSNBC, principally, so far as I can make out, because he knows Cohen
personally and speaks with him often, despite the fact that Deutsch is clearly
a New York Democrat.One of MSNBC’s
hosts is “The Rev,” Reverend Al Sharpton, an old time associate and follower of
Martin Luther King and a fixture in the Civil Rights Movement.The Rev has a weekend morning show on MSNBC,
but he was just on yesterday because he had had breakfast with Cohen, whom he
knows, and was there to report what he had learned.My eyes popped open when this fact was
dropped.Sharpton knows Cohen well
enough that when Cohen wants to reach out to a media figure to peddle some spin
about himself, he calls The Rev??!!When
I was young, we used to make fun of the Old Boy’s Network of Oxford and
Cambridge graduates in England, but this is head-spinning.My mother-in-law, now departed, had a phrase
that she would mutter when someone Jewish was mentioned.She would say, half under her breath, “unser
leute,” which in German or Yiddish, means “our people,” which is to say, one of
us, an insider, someone basically o.k.

When I described the anti-Trump TV commentators as “privileged”
and “self-congratulatory,” this is what I was talking about.

Friday, July 20, 2018

A new poll is out this morning purporting to reveal that 71%
of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of Russia in Helsinki.This has the commentariat pulling out its
collective hair, wondering despairingly what has happened to their father’s
Republican Party.Now I bow to no one in
my conviction that Republicans are the spawn of the devil [please, spare me the
feverish insistence that so are Democrats – I know all that, but that is not
the point of this post.]However, polls
like the one referenced are no particular evidence of this truth.Three times before, in 2010, 2012, and 2015,
I have written about this subject here.I
am going to reprint what I said in 2015, because I am old enough and retro
enough to imagine that if you have written something once, and still believe
it, there is nothing to be gained by writing it differently a fourth time.Here is what I wrote:

“If news reports are to be believed, 54% of Republicans
believe that President Obama is a Muslim [and 100% of them, I assume, consider
being a Muslim an especially bad thing.] When I read reports like
this, I despair for my fellow homo sapiens. The scores
of millions of Americans presumably represented by the poll respondents hold
critical jobs -- as traffic policemen, as bus drivers, as doctors, as lawyers,
as chicken pluckers. If the polls are to be believed, a sizeable
fraction of the cars approaching me here in North Carolina on Interstate 40 at
a combined speed of 160 miles an hour are driven by motorists completely
unhinged from reality. Is it safe for me to drive?

Thus troubled, I looked within for
reassurance. Deep in the far recesses of my memory I found a faint
trace of an article written almost seventy years ago by two of the great
figures of mid-twentieth century American sociology, David Riesman and Nathan
Glazer. I am sure those names are completely unknown to you,
although you may be familiar with some of the terms they gave to our
conversation about public affairs -- "other-directed, "inner-directed,"
"inside dopester."

With remarkably little effort, I located this
essay by means of Google and a few key words: "The
Meaning of Opinion," by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, Public
Opinion Quarterly, Volume 12, No. 4 [Winter 1948-49], pp.
633-648. Read it! It is so far superior to anything
written by sociologists and public opinion pollsters today as to take one's
breath away.

How can it be that 54% of Republicans think Obama is a
Muslim? The answer -- not simple at all -- is that public opinion
polling is a socio-psycho-dynamically complex interaction between the
poll-taker and the respondent in which the manifest content of the question and
answer are a very imperfect representation of the latent interactive processes
taking place in the polling.

In the simplest terms possible, I suggest that the answer to
my despairing question is this: When a pollster asks a respondent
the manifest question "Is President Obama a Muslim?," the respondent
at some level experiences this as the quite different latent question, "Do
you like President Obama?" The respondent understands quite
well, even if not consciously, that to give the patently true answer
"No" to the manifest question would actually be to give the answer
"Yes" to the latent question. So the respondent answers
"Yes" to the manifest question, not wanting to be trapped into
expressing any sort of support or sympathy for Obama. The poll taker
dutifully records this as a "yes" to the manifest question rather than
what it really is, a "No" to the latent question.

I am quite confident that if a polling organization were to
ask a statistically representative sample of Republicans "Does
President Obama have horns?," a significant percentage of respondents
would say "Yes," even though all of them have seen Obama on
television many times and know quite well that he has no horns.”

American voters, by and large, have no actual opinions about
tariffs, Brexit, Russia, NATO, Putin, the rule of law, the balance of powers,
the Constitution, or indeed about democracy.Most voters could not find Russia on an unlabeled world map and haven’t
a clue what the letters NATO stand for, let alone what it is and does.They have plenty of opinions about their
jobs, their families, their neighborhoods, their churches, their health
insurance, and the successes and failures of their favorite sports teams, opinions
that are, epistemologically speaking, factually well-grounded.But opinions about NATO, tariffs, Brexit, and
Putin are, like tastes in soft drinks, coffees, movies, and clothing, status
markers in our society, markers that are quite well understood by everyone.The support for Trump is, I am convinced, an
expression of racial and status anxiety in a society in which a minority of
adults get a huge majority of the rewards, all the while congratulating themselves
publicly on having earned them, thereby telling the majority not only that they
are screwed but that they deserve to be screwed and have only their own
inferiority to blame.All of those
condemning Trump on television, without exception, are, and can easily be seen
to be, members of that privileged self-congratulatory minority.The pollsters may have thought they were
asking, “Do you approve of Trump’s handling of Russia?” but everyone being
polled heard “Are you with the privileged few or with the great unwashed?”Well, for a long time, they would try to suck
up by answering “No” but now they offer the polltaker’s version of the middle
finger and say “Yes.”

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Well, I got hold of a database of the 397 residents of Carolina Meadows who are registered Democrats and cleaned it up so that I could use it to generate personalized letters from me asking for money for the young man running here in the NC 6th CD to upset right wing Freedom Caucus Republican Mark Walker. Today, I drafted a letter and had it copied 400 times at the UPS store. Then I merge printed the 397 letters with address and greeting. After that I generated 397 matching envelopes. I will turn them over to the campaign so that volunteers can fold and stuff them, put in return envelopes, seal them, stamp them and send them out.Needless to say, this does not quite rise to the level of deep thinking about Das Kapital, but it just might help us flip one more seat in November.I am reminded of this delicious passage from Kierkegaard's great short masterpiece, Philosophical Fragments: "When Philip threatened to lay siege to the city of Corinth
and all its inhabitants hastily bestirred themselves in defense, some polishing
weapons, some gathering stones, some repairing the walls, Diogenes seeing all
this hurriedly folded his mantle about him and began to roll his tub zealously
back and forth through the streets. When he was asked why he did this he
replied that he wished to be busy like all the rest, and rolled his tub lest he
should be the only idler among so many industrious citizens. Such conduct is at
any rate not sophistical, if Aristotle be right in describing sophistry as the
art of making money."

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Consider the abject, pathetic display that we saw in Helsinki and in the Singapore meetings with Kim Jong Un the other month. Consider also the fact that, despite the endless bluster and threats about the Special Counsel and the obvious fact that the investigation is moving ever closer to implicating the grifter directly, as yet the White House has not attempted to fire Mr. Mueller or act directly against him, contenting itself instead with petty actions around the margins that are corrupt and injurious and corrosive to the rule of law but ultimately ineffectual.

I contend that these facts lead to several conclusions.

First. The unstable madman is a pathetic weakling and coward. He is an autocrat by nature, but a frightened and empty attempt at an autocrat who constantly tests the waters but will only act when he believes there is no risk.

Second. Pushback works. Resistance works. He has been largely ineffectual at stopping the investigation because he believes it is not safe for him to take bold action.

With all the damage and harm and destruction of this band of thugs, it would be easy to lose sight of what we are accomplishing through resistance. Every day that this pathetic, weak madman does not feel safe enough to levy a frontal assault on our democratic institutions is a day that we are succeeding.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

One of the great attractions of speculation is that it is untethered by the rules of evidence. What could Putin have on Trump? I agree that it is not a salacious videotape. My guess is that Trump is deeply in debt to Putin's oligarchs and is threatened with financial ruin if he gets out of line. I have long wondered whether Trump has much less money than he claims and much less even than he appears to have, judging from his life style. It is genuinely odd.Look, these are hard times, politically. You have to take pleasure where you can find it, and if Trump is now crashing and burning, well, enjoy it, even though it leaves the underlying rot in American life and economy unaltered.Nobody has commented on my evolutionary biological reverie. I had hoped someone who actually knows something about the subject would respond, and either correct me or expand on what I had said.

I watched the Putin-Trump press conference. I do not speak Russian, but I do speak English. I also have the average human being's ability to read body language. My personal judgment? Putin has something on Trump.

Monday, July 16, 2018

My exchange with Jerry Fresia has now become much more serious
than a dispute between two old lefties.Since I think his latest extended comment must be read, I will reproduce
it at the end of these remarks, rather than simply suggest that you hunt it up
in the comments section.

Jerry’s statement is a cry from the heart, a cri de coeur, as the French say, and it
takes precedence over everything I wrote in my previous posts.We are, in this life, not disembodied
spirits, but real human beings who have been born into a specific moment in
time and have lived specific, concrete lives, lives that shape what we
experience and believe.Jerry has earned
his deep-rooted skepticism about everything the powers that be proclaim in a
way that I have not earned my readiness to credit Robert Mueller’s investigation.Since I knew McGeorge Bundy and Henry
Kissinger personally before they become lying defenders of America’s imperial
brutality, I feel a certain confidence in my evaluation of them as lying sacks
of shit, but to the larger world, they were no less credible than Robert
Mueller.

I hope this investigation leads to Trump’s downfall, or at
least to his political emasculation, whatever the underlying truth may be, but as
regards the truth, we must simply wait and see.

Here is Jerry’s comment:

“First let me say that I hate being a fly in the ointment
and, as well, I hate having to take positions that might even bolster Trump's
claims of fake news. I will add that the latter part of your post is perfectly
reasonable and I am attempted to say, "Yeah, that makes sense. I can
accept that." But there's a big BUT that prevents me from doing so.

You haven't addressed two aspects of the situation that just flat out bug me.
One has to do with trust, the other with the smearing of leftists. My guess is
that you would probably agree that the CIA and FBI have have lied to the
American people so many times on so many important issues (including Mueller re
the WMD/Iraq debacle) that refusing to trust what the national security state
declares as truth is rational. So for me, the issue has less to do with
epistemology than it does with heartfelt trauma.

Your work with African Americans and South Africans seems to have had a searing
impact on you and your point of view. We all probably have these kinds of
searing, gut wrenching experiences that impact whom and what we trust. I was an
intelligence officer with the Air Force during the Vietnam War. I never saw
combat but I had a very high top secret clearance and I saw not only the
reality of the horror of that war, I saw the orders of various barbaric
missions days in advance of those order being carried out. It was painful
watching all that unfold. But here's the kicker: as these events unfolded,
government spokespeople and the media ALWAYS lied about was going on. There was
no doubt about this from where sat. I knew various media military analysts knew
almost as much as I did. I even tried to be a whistle blower but was
rebuffed.

I had volunteered. But I was duped. I felt betrayed. It became clear to me that
my life, not to mention the lives of the Vietnamese didn't count for squat. As
time went on, I would learn (thanks to academics such as yourself) that the
systems of betrayal had no limits. The US military tested bacterial weapons on
unsuspecting Americans in San Francisco (MKULTRA), to cite one example of the
contempt gov officials can have toward ordinary people. The CIA lied to JFK
about the Bay of Pigs, knowing it would fail while telling him it would help
oppressed Cubans overthrow the authoritarian Castro (had JFK, by the way, not
shown enormous resolve in refusing US air support, revolutionary Cuba would
never have survived). I believe that Malcom X, JFK, MLK, RFK, Fred Hampton and
many Black Panthers, along with so many young African Americans today have been
either murdered or their murders covered up by the national security state. And
so what is behind all this mayhem and mendacity? Well, it begins with a simple
fact that you have so eloquently explicated time and again: capitalism requires
the exploitation of workers. And so it is not surprising that Martin
Niemöller's first targeted population (First they came for the
communists....") were leftists challenging fascism.

I once believed it all. I seriously drank the kool-aid. But those days are long
gone. Mueller et al may be right. But I won't grant him that validation, not
until he is shown to be correct in a court of law or in some process that
permits his case to be challenged publicly on the evidence. I'm like the wife,
I suppose, who has been cheated on many times. Trust the bastard? Never again.”

The exchanges in the comments section triggered by Jerry
Fresia’s comment and my response raise very interesting questions about what we
know and how we know it.To an extent
that most of us do not often reflect upon, our knowledge of the world is
socially grounded, not the product of individual observation or the formulation
and confirmation and disconfirmation of hypotheses.Let me offer, as a start, a few trivial
examples and then a more serious extended example, all without venturing into
politically or ideologically contested territory.

I believe that Jerry Fresia exists, that he holds a
doctorate from UMass and is a distinguished and successful artist.I believe this because I have read it
online.What is more, I believe that
there is a single individual who repeatedly over the years has commented on
this blog, and that this individual is the very same Jerry Fresia.But I have never met Jerry Fresia, nor have I
observed him writing and posting comments to this blog, and if someone claimed
that this blog persona is the creation of a right wing conspiracy designed [somewhat
unsuccessfully, to be sure] to sow discord on the left, I would have no sound
counterevidence and would be reduced to ineffectual sputtering.

You who read this blog believe, I should imagine, that it is
written by an American philosopher in his eighties named Robert Paul Wolff, but
with the exception of Tom Cathcart, Charles Parsons, and a few others,
including my sister Barbara, none of you has actually met me or talked to
me.For a long time, you could learn
quite a bit about this character Robert Paul Wolff by going to Wikipedia, but
some while ago one of Google’s internal police force decided the article on me
was unsourced and with a keystroke wiped out all of it but the very first
sentence.Should that minatory figure
revisit the entry, I may be completely obliterated, thereby, so far as the
Cloud is concerned, becoming just one more bot.

I also believe that Pelham, Massachusetts, where I lived for
twenty-one years, lies to the northeast of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I
moved in 2008.Why do I believe
this?Because a variety of maps show
that it does.To be sure, I have twice
driven between the two cities, following interstate highways for most of the
distance, but if I were called on to demonstrate to a sceptic the geographic
relationship of the two towns I would be forced to appeal to generally accepted
authorities, including the orientation display in the driving mirror of my 2004
Camry.Someone who doubts such
well-known facts is a nut, a kook, a conspiracy junkie, right?

Well, consider this case.Charles Darwin, as we all know, launched modern evolutionary biology with
his theory of natural selection.But
Darwin had no idea of the mechanisms of biological evolution.It was the work first of Gregor Mendel and
then of Thomas Hunt Morgan that located this mechanism in the genes lying on
chromosomes in the cells of living things.[Personal aside:Hunt worked with
fruit flies, specifically Drosophila Melenogaster, because they have unusually
large chromosomes that are visible using the microscopes available in the early
20th century.My sister,
Barbara, won the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1948 with
research on phenocopies in Drosophila Melenogaster, and as a consequence during
much of her senior year in high school, we ate dinner each evening in the Wolff
household under a small cloud of fruit flies that had escaped from our basement
and come up looking for food.]

The result was something in evolutionary biology known as
the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, given dramatic confirmation and specification by
Watson and Crick’s demonstration of the double helix structure of the chromosome.This synthesis dominated evolutionary biology
for many, many years, yielding Nobel Prizes and other social recognitions of the
brilliant work of several generations of scientists.

There were a few fringe dissenters, of course, as there always
are in science, as in life.One was a
woman name Lynn Margulis, best known as the wife of the astronomer and TV
superstar Carl Sagan.Early inher career as an evolutionary biologist,
Margulis put forward the bizarre hypothesis that very early on, maybe two
billion years ago or so, at a time when life was extremely primitive and
organisms did not even have cellular structures with nuclei, two distinct
organisms merged in a process she called symbiosis.One of the two went on living inside the
other, and when the host reproduced, so did the visitor, independently.According to Margulis, the essential structures
in modern cells known as mitochondria are the descendants of that early
symbiosis.What is more, she claimed,
such symbiotic mergings continue.

Well, established evolutionary biologists scoffed, Margulis
had trouble even publishing her papers, and she spent her career in the sticks first
teaching at Boston University and then at UMass Amherst, where we overlapped
for ten years, although I am sorry to say I never met her.Margulis championed a number of fringe
theories, including the claim that the 9/11 twin towers attack was a false flag
operation and that the towers collapsed not as a result of the impact of the
airplanes but because of timed detonations of bombs placed strategically in the
buildings.

Clearly a nut, right?Right, except for one inconvenient fact.Her theory of symbiosis turns out to be correct, and is now regarded in
the profession as one of the foundations of modern evolutionary biology, along
with the work of Darwin, Hunt, and Watson and Crick.

I think the
specifications in the indictments secured by Mueller are reliable, I genuinely
do.Will it turn out, some months from
now, that Trump consciously and deliberately conspired with Putin.I have no idea, although I strongly suspect
he did.Is the investigation a deep
state conspiracy designed to frustrate the legitimate will the American people
as expressed in the 2016 election.Of
course.Does that make the charges
false?Of course not.I think the charges are true.I also suspect that if an establishment candidate
had engaged in the same behavior, it would have been buried.Does that mean Trump is no worse than Bush or
Obama or Clinton?Nope.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

I have just read the entire 29 page indictment handed down by the Grand Jury against a group of Russian military intelligence officers. You can read it here. I urge you to do so as well.
It is quite remarkable. Mueller
and his team seem to know a good bit about each of these Russians: their names, their cover names, their ranks,
the precise addresses of their offices, the time to the minute when they logged
on, began to hack, planted malware, tried to erase evidences of their hacking,
and on and on. For all I know, Mueller
knows what they have for breakfast. I
wouldn’t be surprised.

Do I believe what the indictment says?Yes I do.I also believe a man walked on the moon, that vaccinations can protect
children from infectious diseases, and that the sun rises in the east. Could I
be wrong about all of these beliefs?Of
course.I have read Descartes’ Meditations I and II.I know the difference between logical
certainty and well established fact. Do
I understand the difference between an indictment and a conviction? Yes, in
fact I know that too.

Do I think there will, before too many months have gone by,
indictments of Americans who conspired with the Russians?I do, actually.Is this speculation on my part?Of course.We shall have to wait and see.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

After Serena Williams powered her way into the Finals at
Wimbledon, I spent some time idly watching a pathetic array of Republicans do
everything they could to harass FBI Agent Peter Strzok during his testimony
before their committee.They managed to
establish three facts:

1.Strzok was
personally extremely opposed to Donald Trump being elected president.

2.Strzok
believed that the FBI had evidence that Trump was conspiring with the Russians
to gain an advantage in the election, evidence which if revealed would hurt
Trump’s election prospects.

3.Strrzok did
absolutely nothing to reveal this evidence to the public before the election.

If we assume that the Republicans desired that Donald Trump
be elected president, why are they not pinning a medal on him?

[The question is a mocking rhetorical question, for those who have trouble identifying irony.]

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

David Baldacci is an enormously successful schlock fiction
writer whose titles, if book jackets are to be believed, have sold 130 million
copies worldwide.I picked up a copy of
his recent 2017 book, End Game, in
the Carolina Meadows library and am now eighty pages from finishing it.About a fifty pages ago, it suddenly dawned
on me that the character who is going to turn out to be the bad guy has a life
story that point for point parallels that of Donald Trump.Suddenly, what was a rather mediocre read has
taken on new interest.

Alert students of the higher reaches of the intellectual sphere
will have seen the distressing stories about the distinguished Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz.It seems that
Professor Dershowitz, who summers on Martha’s Vineyard, has been shunned lately
by the elite inhabitants of that storied vacation retreat who, because of his
defense of President Trump, have stopped inviting him to their dinner
parties.Dershowitz, exhibiting
admirable restraint, has compared this behavior to McCarthyism.But I think a more substantive legal argument
can be advanced.

It is of course second nature to a famous constitutional law
expert like Dershowitz that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution “prohibits
the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments.”What is more, the Supreme Court has ruled that
the “cruel and unusual punishments” clause applies to the states as well. It is beyond dispute that banishment from a Martha’s
Vineyard dinner party is cruel and unusual, and it is surely a very small reach
indeed to extend the constitutional prohibition from states to vacation resorts.

I am no scholar of the law, but I think Professor Dershowitz
has a legitimate cause of action.Inasmuch as such suits can be costly, and Dershowitz, as an emeritus
Harvard professor, is compelled to live on whatever pension that financially strapped
institution provides, I propose that all fair-minded defenders of the rule of
law launch a gofundme effort.I am prepared to commit a penny to the effort,
and if one hundred million good Americans will join me, Professor Dershowitz
will have the beginnings of a defense fund.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

In recent posts, I have spoken of Trump as leading America
into fascism.Rather than continue in
that dramatic rhetorical fashion, I thought today I would say something of a
general nature about the structure of American politics.My conclusion, to get very much ahead of
myself, will be that what is wrong with American politics, and what can be
fixed, starts at the bottom, not at the top.My characterization, I hope, will also illuminate the ways in which
current trends in America do and do not resemble those that brought Hitler and
Mussolini to power.[The fasces, the symbol of power that gives
us the word “fascism,” is ancient Roman in origin, and has been adopted by many
political movements since.]

The drafters of the U. S. Constitution gave to the political
structure of the new Republic three structural characteristics that, taken
together, form the distinctively American political system.First, they adopted a federal structure that
left autonomy and power to the several states.Originally, the federal government was strikingly weak, making seniority
in the Senate, for example, almost as important as the presidency.The modern imperial presidency that we have
come to take for granted is really a product first of the Great Depression and
then of World War II and the ensuing Cold War.

Second, the Constitution was deliberately designed, in
accordance with political theories current in the 17th and 18th
centuries, to make the Senators and Representatives dependent on and answerable
to their territorially defined constituents.The expectation was that the private career self-interest of the
representative would make him or her [it was originally always him] sensitively
attuned to constituents’ interests and desires.It is not a corruption of American democracy that Senators and
Representatives conform their votes in the Legislature to the prejudices of
their constituents rather than to the national interest or the ideals of
democracy.It is a feature, not a bug,
as folks like to say these days.Nor
should we imagine that the moral character of Republicans is necessarily inferior
to that of Democrats.There is really
nothing to choose, from a transcendental perspective, between Mitch McConnell
and Chuck Schumer.Each represents his
constituents quite effectively and sensitively.

Third, the election of the president was to be determined by
each state’s electors rather than by the popular vote.We are all painfully conscious of this feature
of American democracy because the last two Republican presidencies have come to
that office after losing the popular vote.

These structural characteristics, particularly the first and
third, are in no way integral to democracy ­per se.In South Africa, for
example, voters choose political parties, not candidates.Each party nominates an entire slate, in
order of party preference, long enough in theory to fill the legislature.The party’s national share of the popular
vote determines which segment of the list, counting from the top, goes into the
government.Thus, no person in South
Africa can identify his or her representative, and members of the legislature
do not have a defined body of constituents.The third characteristic, the Electoral College, is of course unique to
America.

With this as the fundamental structure of American
democracy, there are two features of the contemporary operation of the political
system that, more than any other, deserve our attention.One of these is vastly more important than
the other.

The first feature is the role of money in elections.Although this feature routinely gets enormous
attention by progressive critics of the system, particularly in the aftermath
of the infamous Citizens United Supreme
Court decision, it is in fact relative to other factors not terribly
important.America is a very large and
very wealthy country, and elections are not very expensive.In a full-scale presidential campaign these
days, the two parties together spend about as much in total as Americans will
spend that year on peanut butter, namely ~2.5 billion dollars.There are more than enough super-rich lefties
to fill the coffers of the Democratic Party, and if a candidate wishes to go
the Bernie Sanders route, well, ten million supporters donating $25 each will
provide 250 million dollars.What is
more, whereas television is expensive, social media are virtually free.A lack of money on the left does not explain
why America is teetering on the edge of fascism.

The second feature, which is the key to everything that is
currently politically wrong with America, is that vast numbers of Americans eligible
to vote do not bother to do so.This has
nothing to do with voter suppression efforts, by the way, which operate at the
margins.The simple fact is that in
presidential elections, only 55-60% of the eligible voters vote, and in
mid-term elections, only 35-40% vote.Once again, this is not inevitable.Currently, there are about ten democracies around the world that actually
require all citizens to vote.

So, as I have often observed on this blog, in the American
political system as it currently operates, the secret to success is mobilizing
and motivating one’s supporters.[Gerrymandering,
which currently favors Republicans, is entirely a consequence of the success of
the Republicans in bringing their supporters to the polls in mid-term and
off-year state elections.]The Democrats
actually have a majority share of the electorate in their support, and for a
variety of demographic reasons, their advantage is over time improving.

Why then are we not having fun?

There are many reasons, but one stands out, in my view,
above all the others.A large part of
the White majority is affronted, offended, frightened, angered, and bewildered
by the patent fact that America is moving inexorably toward majority non-white
status.These emotions dominate and even
put into eclipse economic interest, with two consequences:First, enabling Republicans to successfully
serve the interests of big business by playing on the racial fears of Whites
whom they are economically screwing; and Second, enabling an opportunist like Trump
to drop the dog whistles and go full frontal fascist.

What can we do?Sigh.It is such a letdown to
follow this highfalutin analysis with a banal punch line, but the answer is
simple.Vote.

Sunday, July 8, 2018

I have had my fun with establishment American economists,
likening them to denizens of Plato’s Cave, building brilliant careers on
guessing at the succession of images flickering on the cave wall.Still and all, fair is fair, and though they
are biologically incapable of forming the words “Karl Marx,” the best of them
really are good at predicting
shadows. So this morning, I shall tip my
hat to Paul Krugman, shadow guesser supreme, who in this Op Ed column does a
nice job of anatomizing the self-destructive inanity of Trump’s trade wars.

I was rather struck by the fact that my post entitled “Two EMail
Messages” provoked only two comments, both of them simply links to other
sites.I fear the point of the post may
have been lost.My purpose was to
contrast the prosaic and utterly unremarkable content of the phone script with
Phil Green’s beautifully articulated cry of despair, something I would have been
proud to write had I his polemical skill. I was trying to illustrate how mundane actual
political work is, at the ground level.

I have now made my first 19 calls, leaving the remaining 12
for this afternoon.The result?I left 10 messages on answering machines, was
told that 5 numbers were disconnected, got one no-answer [no answering
machine], one weird sound, was told tartly by one woman to please remove her
from our call list, and spoke to one enthusiastic supporter who thanked me for
my service.Is this really a good use of
the time of a man who is, as Clint Eastwood puts it in one movie, a legend in
his own mind?Indeed it is.Since I have nothing better to do, the
opportunity cost is zero.But there is
more to it than that.Let me explain.

The fundamental fact about midterm elections in America is
that most eligible voters don’t vote.Roughly 35-40% of those who can vote bother to do so.Republican Freedom Caucus member Mark Walker has
won the 6th North Carolina CD the two times he has run by about
59-41%.For the sake of numerical simplicity,
call it a 60/40 district.This is an
enormous hill for young Democratic challenger Ryan Watts to climb.It would seem that he must persuade one out
of every six Republicans to switch parties, an impossible task.But appearances can deceive.Consider.

Suppose that in November the Republicans in the N.C. 6th
CD are a tad dispirited, and not energized because Trump’s name is not on the
ballot.Let us imagine that they turn out
at a low but not at all impossible 33%.At the same time, suppose the local Democrats are fired up, by babies
torn from mothers’ arms, by Mueller indictments, by the threat of the
overturning of Roe v. Wade, and come to the polls in numbers more to be
expected in a presidential year, say 50% of them.Now 1/3 of 60 is 20, and ½ of 40 is also 20, and
suddenly a 60-40 district becomes a 50-50 race, in which an upset is entirely
possible.

What has to happen for this fantasy to become reality?Here
we come to the on the ground reality of American politics, which is that
organizationally, it is radically decentralized.I am not just talking about the fact that the
political organization of each state is a world unto itself, but that this
decentralization reaches right down to the county level.Sometimes, in presidential years, a national
campaign achieves a startling degree of efficiency, as in fact Obama’s two
campaigns did, but for the most part, and especially in off-year elections, candidates
must rely on the organizational muscle of the local party, and that varies
greatly from state to state, county to county.

For whatever historical reason, the North Carolina Democratic
Party is a rather pathetic mess, so much so that in 2008 and 2012, when I
worked here for Obama, I observed that his campaign staff simply bypassed the
state party.It made no use, for example,
of the state party’s outdated and inadequate database of voters, addresses,
phone numbers, and party registration.If Ryan Watts is to achieve a Democratic voter turnout sufficient to turn
a 60/40 district into a 50-50 race, he is going to need accurate voter
records.Now, Chatham County, where I
live, is one of the few Democratic bastions in a Republican CD, and it has a
pretty good county Democratic machine, but Alamance County, 30 miles to the
northwest, does not.So the Chatham
County Dems are offering a helping hand to the Alamance County Dems by making
calls to update the lists and reach out to supporters in Alamance.

And that is why I
sat at my desk yesterday, and will sit at my desk today, working my way down
the list of numbers and reading from my script.

Saturday, July 7, 2018

When I got up this morning, there were two email messages
for me, aside from the flood of political money appeals.In light of the vigorous discussion that has
sprung up in response to my post about ringing doorbells, I thought I would
reproduce both of them here.I cannot
imagine a more striking contrast.

The first message was from a volunteer with the Ryan Watts
Congressional campaign.She had sent me
a list of 30 names and telephone numbers, and I had promised to call them this
weekend.This is the “script”:

“Hello, I am (name) ______ a volunteer with Ryan Watts'
Campaign, Ryan is our 6th Congressional District Democratic Candidate. We are
inviting you to Ryan's Town Hall on Thursday, July 12th, 6:30 pm to 8:00
pm, auditorium at Alamance Community College in Graham. Will you be able
to attend the Town Hall?Thank you.”

Alamance is a town roughly in the middle of the 6th
CD, just off Interstate 85.

The second message was from Philip Green, a well-known
political scientist and radical activist, a professor emeritus from Smith
College, a member of The Nation editorial
board, and the author of many fine books.Phil and I first met in Sunnyside, Queens.He was three and I was two.It is said we rode on occasion in the same
baby carriage on Skilman Avenue.

SEVEN THESES Phil Green. 7/4/18

I. The Present

Engels proclaimed in the 19th Century that the choice was "Socialism or
Barbarism." The suspense is over. The barbarians are not at the
gates, they're inside. More, they're inside the Temple: ultra-Orthodox Jews in
Israel, Orthodox Christians in Russia, fundamentalists in the Islamic world,
evangelical Christians in America. The New Testament as a blueprint for
theocratic tyranny and contempt for the weak, the stateless, the needy. No need
for Attila; any minister will do.

II. The Constitution

Stalin famously asked "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
The answer is not recorded, though we know the Pope won in the end.
Donald Trump has asked, over and over again, "How many divisions does the
Constitution have?" And the answer, over and over, has been crystal
clear to him: None. Lots of handwringing by liberal lawyers on MSNBC,
exegeses of what this or that passage really means, outcries by Democrats.
Drops of fresh tears in the ocean of salt. The 14th and 15th Amendments and the
Voting Rights Act are dead. In the latter case Vladimir Putin, the
international gangster whose boots he lovingly licks, will help cement the
elimination of "free and fair" elections. The 1st and 2nd Amendments
are perverted beyond recovery; due process (Amendments 4, 5, and 6) and the
Rule of Law have been effectively abolished, the DOJ turned into a
"Handmaid" of tyranny.
The President is the most powerful person on the Planet; nothing
he has done or does can be overturned) no matter what happens in the
Midterms. The Supremes, soon to be instantiated as the High Court of
Theocracy and Autocracy, as well as an obeisant Republican Party, will ensure
all that. The Constitution is indeed, as has sometimes been said, but a piece
of parchment. Shreddable. Or like Wiley E. Coyote, it's been running off the
edge of a cliff while pretending it wasn't falling. Gravity has won.

III. The Police State

Concentration camps. A legitimized Gestapo that rules at will, wherever
it goes, with brute force behind it. Geheimestaatspolizei.
Violence cannot be contained at a border. The knock on the door is the
Law. Militarized police enforce White Supremacy. As one German commentator put
it, we have "Anti-Semitism without Jews." On this Continent,
Muslims and Central Americans will serve just as well. Not to mention
transsexuals. And uppity young blacks. And women who don't treat their fetuses
with proper respect.

IV. "Totalization"

Let us celebrate all those clever accommodationsists who predicted the
"end of ideology," the "triumph of liberal democracy," and
best of all, the end of "totalizing theories," i.e. Marxism,
i.e., "totalitarianism." Just as the final totalization of all,
the unregulated "free" market, was taking over everywhere. Like
those TV sports analysts who lucidly explain why something is happening one
play before the opposite comes crashing to life.
Totalization: in a perfect inversion of Michael Walzer's Spheres
of Justice, there is no sphere of social living that can justly resist
that take-over, nothing that can't be bought or sold, no scrap of welfare that
can't be dispensed with, except of course the military budget, the first-resort
instrument of white male justice and the capitalism with which it has made its
peace. Ralph Miliband coined the term "totalitarian capitalism"
to describe China. Or coming to theater near you, government by the
Kochs, the Adelson, the Thieles, the Mercers. But sure, Leon Golub can hang his
art anywhere.

V. Fascism

The climb may have been difficult, but the descent is proving to be
easy.The recipe is simple. The Devil's Bargain: the plutocracy gets the
votes of the white supremacy tribe–by no means limited to the so-called
"working class." In return, the Authoritarian Populist mob, its
appeal to violence unrestrained, gets to rule over its opponents in the name of
"The People." When I hear that phrase I reach for my passport.
In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Liberals keep complaining incredulously, "but they're voting
against their own interests!" Fateful misunderstanding. For nihilism
and bigotry, there's always work to be done. The only requirement is a leader
who will call that spirit from the vasty deep. The mob then votes for the
grandest self-interest of all: revenge. Schadenfreud. Ressentiment.
Straight out of Central Europe, the train is on its way To The Munich Station.
Smash families? Steal children? The best "fuck you" money can buy.
Melted ice caps lapping at our shores? "There will be rain tonight...Let
it come down." "Find what occurred at Linz/What huge imago made a
psychopathic god." Or in Queens. The license to say "Fuck you"
to everyone you hate, or feel hard done by, or envy, or above all, feel
dispossessed by: robbed of your centuries-old reward of
over-representation.

VI. Resistance

The police are either legitimate or they are not. If they are, nothing
more to be said. If not, nothing will come out of nothing. Not marches in
the park, not articles in The Nation, not even female veterans of combat
running for office everywhere. Good for morale. But they only
understand force. Masses: blocking the Courthouse steps, as in Poland;
taking over the forbidden voting places; keeping ICE out of churches,
workplaces, homes. Fighting back. Not going gentle: making them
know what they have to do, and forcing them to do it–letting everyone see their
true colors, the stakes, the cost. Losing, but not surrendering.

Thursday, July 5, 2018

I am not offering to ring doorbells and make calls out of faux man of the people humility. If there were something more consequential I could do, I would do it. I am beside myself with despair and apprehension, and I need to do something. Working for the local Democratic challenger is something, and if I can manage to multiply my vote by getting others to the polls, then I need to do it. Will my efforts all by themselves make the difference? Of course not. Will my efforts and those of a relatively small number of others -- twenty, thirty, fifty others -- make the difference? Very possibly. I won't know unless I try. I don't like the mechanics of campaigning. It is not my preferred way to spend the summer and beyond. But these really are perilous times.

I am genuinely flattered by the comments by Jerry Fresia and S. Wallerstein. However, I shall persevere with my journeyman work of knocking on doors and making calls, or whatever else the Watts campaign wants me to do. None of that will interfere with my writing, which I do for the most part in my head anyway. I rather doubt I am suited to be a Thomas Paine. My inclination is to engage in analysis rather than to issue calls to arms. I have been writing for sixty years, and I do not think asnyone ever put me on a banner or a bumper sticker.By the way, I just went on line to check out Paul Krugman's latest Op Ed column for the TIMES, and found this opening sentence, which captures perfectly everything I hate about him:"As I wrote the other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may call herself a socialist and represent the left wing of the Democratic party, but her policy ideas are pretty reasonable."He really is insufferable.

When Susie and I moved south to Chapel Hill, NC, we found
ourselves in a blue puddle surrounded by a red sea.The fourth Congressional District of North
Carolina is a safely Democratic enclave that has been represented for thirty
years [save for a brief two year lapse] by David Price, a reliably liberal Democrat
who holds a Yale doctorate in Political Science and taught at Duke before
entering Congress.He wins re-election
each time he runs by anywhere from 15 to 30 points.As a consequence, voting in Chapel Hill was
pleasant but politically pointless.I
might just as well have stayed home.

A year ago, we moved again, this time five miles further
south to Carolina Meadows, the continuing care retirement community that is now
our home.Thanks to the precise and
thoughtful planning of the Republican majority in the state legislature, Carolina
Meadows lies about four and a half feet inside the 6th CD, an
equally reliable Republican stronghold.The 6th CD is represented by the execrable Mark Walker, now in
his second term.Walker is an extreme
right-wing member of the House Freedom caucus, briefly famous a short while ago
for opining, after the Catholic House of Representatives Chaplain was abruptly
fired by Paul Ryan, that the House needed a chaplain with a wife and children –
which is to say, not a Catholic.Walker,
by the way, was a Baptist minister for twenty years.

The 6th CD is what the political insiders call an
R +9 district, which is to say it usually goes for the Republicans by 18
points, more or less [+9 means 9 points over 50%, not 9 points over the
Democrat.]This year, Walker is being
challenged by Ryan Watts, a 27 year old graduate of UNC Chapel Hill making his
political debut.Watts is no fire
breathing liberal, but he has articulated a standard moderately progressive
program, in hopes that a blue wave will carry him to D.C.Manifestly, Watts has a big hill to climb,
but after all, Conor Lamb eked out a win in a Pennsylvania R +10 district, so hope
springs eternal.I have volunteered to
work for the Watts campaign, at least during the next eight weeks before the
Fall Columbia semester begins.

In midterms, the whole game is turnout, of course.The norm is for 35-40% of the eligible voters
actually to go to the polls.Carolina
Meadows is in Chatham County, one of the few D-leaning counties of the 6th
CD.Carolina Meadows itself, as I have
reported, is a hotbed of support for the Democratic Party, but getting people
here to vote is not difficult.Carolina
Meadows is actually the voting location for our precinct, which means the my
fellow old folks can vote on their way to the dining room or the library.The rest of Chatham County, to our south, is
mostly rural land with a few urban centers, such as Pittsboro and Siler City,
and there ought to be some Democratic votes to harvest there.

I do not much enjoy politicking, if the truth be told, but I
volunteered for Obama and walked door to door for Clinton, so while I diet, I
will do what the Watts campaign wants me to do, and hope that I can bring a few
lazy souls to the polls.I think this is
the most important election I have participated in since I first knocked on
doors in East Cambridge for Adlai Stevenson in 1956.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Among today’s news stories was a report that the Trump
administration, not surprisingly, will oppose considerations of race in college
admissions.As I walked this morning, I
carried out an argument in my head, as I so often do, this time against a
defender of the administration position arguing in typical self-righteous
fashion for college admissions based solely on merit, on demonstrated academic
accomplishment or promise.Rather than
key my discussion today to the fact that it is the Fourth of July [we
anarchists are not big on national holidays], I thought I would put in some
coherent form the substance of my imagined argument.As always, I find it useful to begin with
some statistics and some history [save when talking about Kant, but that is
another matter entirely.]

Higher education on the North American continent is 382
years old, if we take the 1636 founding of Harvard College as our terminus a quo.Over that time, there have been four
significant changes in the undergraduate portion of American higher education,
all of them taking place in the fifteen years or so after World War II.

The first change was the explosion of public higher
educational institutions, dramatically and permanently changing the balance of private
and public institutions.Until the end
of WW II, the private sector dominated, even though, as a consequence of the
Land Grant Act of 1862, a sector of state universities came into existence.Although private colleges are created only
rarely, so many state university campuses and state college systems have come
into existence in the past sixty or seventy years that there are now more than
2,600 college and university campuses in the United States offering four year
degrees.

The second change was the transformation of regional
colleges and universities into national [and even international]
institutions.Before the war, schools
like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, et al. served mostly local
clientele.It was unusual, for example, for
someone from the Midwest or far west or deep south to go to college in New
England.Starting after the war, schools
actively sought nationally representative student bodies.

The third change was the dramatic rise in the number of
applicants to the most highly sought after colleges, a change in part resulting
from the sharp increase in the number of young people seeking higher
educational degrees [I leave to one side the deeper question whether they were
seeking higher education.]A few
anecdotal statistics will illustrate this change.In 1950, when I started my undergraduate
education at Harvard, only 5% of adult Americans had college degrees.Ninety-five
percent did not.Sixty eight years
later, 35% of adult Americans have college degrees, still a small minority, but
seven times as many proportionately. When
I applied 1949 for admission to Harvard, 2200 young men applied, 1650 were
admitted, and 1250 of us showed up to form the class of ’54.It was much easier to get into Harvard when I
applied than it is today to get into the University of Massachusetts.

There was a fourth change, the change that has given rise to
the debate about so-called Affirmative Action.It was a response both to the dramatic rise in the number of high school
graduates seeking college degrees and to the transformation of colleges and universities
from regional to national aspirations.Let
me explain, again by the use of an anecdote.By 1960, I had my doctorate, had done a stint in the army, and was an
Instructor at Harvard, living in Winthrop House as a Resident Tutor [free room
and board in return for talking to undergraduates.]One day McGeorge Bundy stopped by to visit
the Senior Common Room.He was then Dean
of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, before he went off to Washington to be
Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor and oversee the Bay of Pigs and
America’s entry into Viet Name.He
remarked that Harvard now was getting 5000 applicants a year [two and a half
times as many as a decade earlier, but of course nothing like the 42,742 who
applied this past year.]Bundy said, “One
thousand are clear admits, one thousand are clear rejects, and the real problem
is making decisions about the remaining three thousand, every one of whom has
something to be said for him.”

In short, elite colleges went from having admissions requirements to designing and
implementing admissions policies.Until that period, colleges had simply
specified the preparation required for admissions – so much Latin, so much
mathematics, and so forth.But the flood
of applicants at the elite schools presented a problem.Many more young people were applying for
admission than there was room for, so some deliberate choices had to be made
about what one wanted the entering class to look like.This was not a problem at the majority of
colleges and universities, be it noted.They were fighting to fill their classrooms.But with the competition for good jobs in the
economy and the rising educational credentials for those jobs, made possible by
the increase in the number of college graduates, the value of a degree from an
elite college soared, and so did the pool of applicants.

The first result was an expansion of the college
bureaucracies.Entire Admissions
Departments, headed up by Deans of Admissions, came into existence.Little by little, decisions were made at the administrative
level that translated in to admissions policies.A number of admissions criteria were put in
place around the country, not only in the private higher educational sector, but
in the elite public sector as well.Everyone
these days is aware of at least some of these criteria, but it is worth
enumerating them to focus our attention on just how much of a change in
admissions practices they involved.Here
are just a few:

1:Private
colleges adopted the policy of giving preference to applicants one of whose
parents had attended the college – so-called “legacies.”

4:Colleges
sought to achieve and maintain a balance of undergraduates pursuing degrees in
the Arts and Humanities, in the Social Sciences, and in Natural Science and
Mathematics.

5:Colleges sought
to restrict the number of Jewish undergraduates [now a somewhat less popular
criterion of admissions or rejection.]

6:Colleges
sought to recruit young men with special gifts or potential in intercollegiate
sports.Later, this policy was extended
to young women as well.

7:Colleges
sought to maximize their impact on the larger society by recruiting students
who gave evidence of a desire to go into public service of some sort.

NOT A SINGLE ONE OF
THESE POLICIES HAS ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ACADEMIC ABILITY OR
ACCOMPLISHMENT.

In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, northern
elite colleges began admitting, and then even recruiting, students of color.And all hell broke loose.People of the highest and most unimpeachable
principle, who had caviled not at all at admission preferences based on
legacies, on gender balance, on regional distribution, on fields of
concentration, on religion, on sports ability, or on ambitions for public
service, suddenly discovered that they were academic purists, concerned that
admission be based on academic accomplishment or ability alone.

It would be otiose to observe that these objections are
transparently racist.

What in earth would an undergraduate body be like that was
recruited solely on the basis of academic considerations?My personal example, which may of course be
dated now, is the contrast I observed between the students walking the halls of
Harvard and of MIT.The Harvard students
looked as though they had responded to a call from central casting for a TV
advertising gig:handsome, pulled
together, neatly dressed, pleasingly varied in their racial and cultural
diversity.The MIT students were utterly
different: tall, short, fat, thin, geeky, black, white, red, brown, yellow,
weird.Pretty obviously one could see
that all they had in common was smarts.

The case giving rise to the dispute about affirmative action
is the manifest effort of Harvard to hold down the proportion of Asian students,
who are the new Jews.I have no doubt
the new assault on affirmative action will succeed, but I do not think I can
bear the smug assertions by the supporters of this assault that all they care
about is academic ability.Puleeese.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.